You are here

Video Games

No Man's Sky is out, and the reviews have been - well, appropriate, for the most part. This was a hugely hyped, hugely ambitious game that just fell short. It gets more annoying when you realize just how close to the mark it was and how just a bit more polish could have made the game just flat-out better.

So with that in mind, here are some of the ways I felt the game fell short:

I've been playing quite a bit of Just Cause 3 recently. It's OK. But it isn't great. And I want to go into some of the reasons for that.

First off, let's start with the well known, the bugs. The bugs are the number one reason why you should not buy this game yet. The game is unplayable on "lesser" PCs and I can only play for about an hour before the memory leaks and slow down catch up to my PC. This means you have to restart the game every once and a while when playing. Bugs can be fixed, though. So - beyond the save game corruption bug - let's not dwell on the bugs and focus on what really makes the game suck: the challenges.

I've updated my Colossal Cave Adventure JavaScript port. It fixes a few bugs related to the Plover room, but probably more importantly, adds the ability to save the game. Save games are done by creating a new link that can be bookmarked. The URL can be loaded in order to restore the game to whatever state it was at when the game was saved.

Apparently I didn't manage to miss out the joy of PAX Pox, despite not going to the 2009 PAX Prime. I still got a terrible cold after returning home from PAX Prime this year. Although I think I most likely got it from the flight home and not PAX itself.

It turns out that ZSNES has a video dumping facility. Unfortunately, all of its presets are crap and it wants to dump the video out as YUV, which looks horrible. And you need to download MEncoder, which can be hard to find.

Well, since I've actually got the thing working for the most part, try playing the Colossal Cave Adventure, ported to JavaScript! This (should) be the entire mostly-original game, playable right from in your browser.

I've basically completely glossed over the Raven rankings, so as another text-only update, let's go through the Ranking Ravens. The Top 10 Ravens are given using their ranks at the start of the game, the ranks change as you play through the game.

Sometimes these changes are based on fights with enemy Ravens, but frequently, they change regardless of your actions.